What is abortion access like in the NWT?

While many people face challenges accessing healthcare in the North, advocates say a program is helping people access reproductive choice and abortion services in the NWT.

The Northern Options for Women (or Now) Program has existed for more than a decade.

The confidential program offers pregnancy options counselling, ultrasound evaluation, abortion services, prescriptions for birth control after abortions, and referral to other support services to people experiencing unwanted or abnormal pregnancies and miscarriages.

“The fact that there’s quite a bit of available choice for clients in the NWT across a huge geographic expanse, the fact that people can access abortion services in many places … is a real success,” said territorial medical director Claudia Kraft.

“I think this is an example of the right answer to the problem of how to deliver specialized and high-quality care across such a big territory.”

The program serves people from across the NWT and Nunavut’s Kitikmeot region. Individuals can be referred through a health provider or make an appointment on their own.

Kraft said services are provided at two primary sites, Yellowknife and Inuvik, while some services may also be available in other communities depending on provider availability.

Grace Chambers, a nurse with the Now Program, said staff involved are passionate about reproductive choice and the provision of safe, coordinated, high-quality and timely care.

“Abortion is healthcare,” she said.

“This is a very vulnerable time in people’s lives and I think I wanted to be a part of being able to make a person’s experience with abortion as positive as possible.”

On-call phone support available

In recent years, the Now Program has been collaborating with the Northern Birthwork Collective’s abortion support program. It offers confidential on-call phone support from trained doulas and support workers on Wednesdays and Thursdays.

Collective co-founder Sabrina Flack said what that support looks like varies depending on people’s needs.

“Our birth workers really just hold space for them to talk about their feelings and not push them in any sort of direction,” she said.

Flack said birth workers can provide information on procedures and offer logistical support, emotional support and a distraction if one is needed, as well as connect people to mental health resources. The program also provides taxi vouchers and accompaniment to help people get to and from appointments.

“It’s not a crazy busy program, but when it’s needed it’s so impactful,” Flack said. “Often when it’s needed is when someone is coming to Yellowknife, or lives in Yellowknife already, and is accessing an abortion and they don’t have any other support.”

Services vary across Canada

Abortion has been legal in Canada since 1988, when the Supreme Court of Canada ruled in R v Morgentaler that criminalizing abortion was unconstitutional.

The federal government has said abortion is one of the most commonly performed medical procedures in the country and an estimated one in three Canadian women will have an abortion in their lifetime.

Access to services, however, varies across the country and within provinces and territories. In PEI, for example, legal abortions were not performed on the island from 1982 to 2017.

Barriers can include a lack of local services, the cost of travel, misinformation, and challenges accessing culturally responsive and stigma-free services.

Surgical abortion is currently available in every province and territory but not every community. Medical abortion, or the use of medication to terminate a pregnancy, is now covered by all provincial and territorial health plans.

The NWT government began covering the cost of Mifegymiso – the brand name for the combination of Mifepistone and Misoprostol, also known as the “abortion pill” – for all residents in 2019.

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